1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to electronic systems, and relates more particularly to a system and method for determining a set of attributes based on content of communications.
2. Description of the Background Art
Users of PCs, workstations, laptops, and other electronic devices may send and receive electronic communications such as e-mail, voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) messages, facsimiles (faxes), HTML-formatted documents, text documents, spread-sheet type documents, and other types of documents and communications via transmission media such as twisted-pair wire, coaxial cable, and wireless. The continued growth of communication traffic is fueled by the proliferation of electronic devices with Internet access and multimedia capabilities, increases in home and business networking, access to broadband transmission, and e-commerce activity. For example, a user of an electronic device may receive a communication over broadband digital subscriber line (DSL) from a first device connected to a wide-area network (WAN) such as the Internet, or the user may receive a communication over an Ethernet connection from a second device connected to a local area network (LAN).
In other words, the volume of electronic communications received by electronic devices is increasing due to an increase in networked, multimedia-capable, electronic devices operating in a environment of global connectivity with high transmission bandwidth. The growth in volume of electronic communications, including document transfers, appears unbounded. The organization of large volumes of multimedia communications received and processed by users of electronic devices is particularly time consuming. For example, users spend time analyzing each communication for content before categorizing and saving communications to file folders. This task becomes burdensome when large amounts of electronic communications are received by electronic devices. It would be advantageous to automate the organization of electronic communications and documents received by electronic devices to assist in the task of filing or responding to the wide variety of communications.